Ok, you won't see this often on Internet forums.
I'm going to have to humbly concede this point. Well argued.
I was so focused on causality that I wasn't thinking clearly. I'm still not 100% convinced that there can't exist some condition in some other existence where one or more laws don't hold, but discussion of whether the laws of logic are absolute is a debate for greater minds than mine.
I see that to continue on with reasonable discussion I need to accept them.
My real problem here is with what I see as violations of the principle of causality.
So, lets debate...
TBC.
I think something Bill Craig said in response to Carroll's similar objection is pertinent here.
A grad student and friend of Bill Craig pointed out to him that some would object to premise 1 because, "it presupposes an Aristotelian conception of causality, according to which substances stand in causal relations to one another, whereas contemporary theories of causation think of causal relations as obtaining between other entities, for example, events or states of affairs. The contemporary causal theorist would not say that God is the cause of the universe, but, for example, that God’s
creating the universe is the cause of the universe’s
coming into being."
Craig goes on to say, "Now I think that the view that causal relations obtain between substances (as well as between events or states of affairs) is perfectly defensible.
1 We say that God created the universe, just as Tolstoy wrote
Anna Karenina or Picasso painted
Guernica, which statements posit causal relations between these things. But I’m constantly engaged in honing my arguments to make them more immune to possible objections, so I re-formulated the first premiss to make it as neutral as possible with respect to one’s theory of causation."
This re-formulation can be written as:
1. If the universe began to exist, then there is a transcendent cause which brought the universe into existence.
Craig goes on to say regarding his debate with Carroll, "My opening speech actually includes a footnote at this point (which, of course, was not delivered orally) which reads:
(1) does not presuppose a particular analysis of the causal relation. It requires simply that the universe did not come into being uncaused. For the universe to come into being without a cause of any sort would be to come into existence from nothing, which is worse than magic.
(1) leaves it entirely open whether the transcendent cause is a substance, an event, a state of affairs, or what have you.
Notice the justification of (1): it’s obvious. In magic, the magician makes a material thing come into being without any material substratum. But if (1) is false, then the universe came into being without either a material or a productive cause, which is truly worse than magic. Anyone who denies (1) should therefore also have no problem with magic."
Read more:
Some Reflections on the Sean Carroll Debate | Reasonable Faith
So it seems to me that as long as you dont think that the universe could have come into being from nothing, by nothing, then you would accept the revised premise without any misgivings regarding the concept of causality. Accept that it is at least more plausible than its negation.